If Cullman County, Alabama, can elect a black legislator, Barack Obama is not such a long shot after all

If a black man running for president is still considered a long shot, what would you call a black man running for the state Legislature in Cullman County?

If you'd asked me before last Tuesday, I'd have told you there's no word to describe such odds.

Impossible.

Incomprehensible.

Not gonna happen.

So, when I learned that James Fields, a black Democrat, had indeed won the legislative seat I'd deemed beyond his reach, well, I almost fell out of my chair.

Forget for a moment that Fields won in a district that is almost all white. Fields was elected in Cullman County.

If you've lived here very long, you know what I mean. If you're not from around here, I'll tell you: Cullman County has a reputation of being not hospitable to black people. I know. I'm from there. Since moving away, I've spent no shortage of time answering people's questions about a certain sign that supposedly warned black people not to stick around after dark.

My honest answer: I don't know if the sign ever existed. But I know the sentiment was there. I went to public schools 12 years without a single black classmate. Lots of goofy ideas flourish in that kind of isolation.

Yes, I've seen some improvements. Just this past year, in my old home church, I attended a great revival service featuring a guest choir from Colony, which is Fields' hometown and known as the black town in Cullman. But the county still is overwhelmingly white, and some people think it should stay that way.

And yet thousands of Cullman Countians on Tuesday elected Fields to represent them in Alabama's Legislature. Fields easily beat Wayne Willingham, a white, Republican county commissioner.

You have to wonder what Republicans must be thinking. They had painted this race to fill Democrat Neal Morrison's seat as an opening volley of their plan to take control of the Legislature in 2010. "It kind of kicks the year off and will kind of put us in the driver's seat for the rest of the year and fulfill what we want to do," Republican spokesman Philip Bryan told reporters before the election.

Instead, they got beat. In conservative Cullman County. By a black candidate.

Fields, for one, doesn't sound surprised. He was confident he knew the people of the district, he knew what mattered most to them and that they'd respond to a candidate who dealt honestly with them.

"I just believed," he said. "I believed we could do it, I believed in our message and I believed in the people of Cullman."

Lt. Gov. Jim Folsom, who lives in Cullman and who campaigned for Fields, was confident, too. Folsom told his pals even before the primary that Fields, a longtime employee of the Alabama Department of Industrial Relations and a part-time Methodist preacher, was well-liked in Cullman and could very well "win the whole shooting match."

But other natives were as shocked as I was.

"I woulda thought Al Sharpton could have been elected governor of Alabama before our dear friends in Cullman would have elected the fine guy they did to the Alabama Legislature," one homeboy said in an e-mail to me.

Even state Sen. Zeb Little, a powerful Democrat from Cullman, admits he had not been particularly encouraging to Fields at the outset.

"It's not just the fact that it's Cullman," Little was quick to tell me on Thursday. "I doubt there's any legislative district where a black man represents a 97 percent white district. .¤.¤. On paper, it just doesn't happen."

I know, I know. The reverse is true, too. I live in state Rep. Patricia Todd's district, and I well remember the reaction when a white woman was elected in a majority-black district. It wasn't all nice.

Still.

As someone who has taken lots of insults about Cullman over the years, and as someone who has occasionally fudged when people asked where I was from -- "Oh, it's a little north of here" -- it's nice to see signs of progress in my home county.

Does this bode well for Barack Obama? I don't know. Pollsters still point to a racial divide among Alabama voters in the Obama vs. Hillary Clinton contest.

But I have to think that if a good black candidate can win white voters in Cullman County, it can happen anywhere.

Robin DeMonia is an editorial writer for The News. E-mail: rdemonia@bhamnews.com.